Has anyone else noticed that some sort of update caused Remote Assistance in XP to suddenly become slow and start hanging? I know XP won't be a concern for us much longer, but we're riding that puppy out 'till they say we can't any longer... it is a fine product.

Some background: We have a network with 150 computers. We've been using Remote Assistance for years with XP, and added Windows 7 into the mix without problems. Just ask the user for their computer name, put it in the tool on the admin computer, and it would connect within seconds.

But starting a few months ago, with XP only, it takes upwards of 60-90 seconds for the connection to happen and start displaying the end-user's desktop. Any tech knows this 60-90 full seconds of silence on a phone is a nightmare... it doesn't take long for the user to start thinking up other things they want to ask you. Anyhow, during this 30-90 sec delay, the end user reports seeing the interface appearing on their screen, but it's just a white box that appears like a hung application. Then, without rhyme or reason, it kicks in and starts working. This is on 2 year old computers with Core2 Duo processors and 2GB of memory... no reason for these delays, unless something arbitrary is causing it. Nothing in the error logs, since technically it is still working, eventually.

Still works great with Windows 7 (who are in the same OU and under the same group policy), and we've had no changes to our network equipment, etc. (i.e. It appears to be happening at a higher application level, not at the network level). The only major change I can think of is applying those wonderful Windows Updates each month.

That's a whole 'nother problem... those .NET updates are becoming practically uninstallable on Windows XP boxes (taking 1 to 2 hours sometimes)... even the "Checking for Updates" scan takes an incredibly long time on XP. If I were a bit more of a conspiracy theorist, I'd call Microsoft out on this obvious ploy to break something so beautiful.

1 Reply

The most common cause of logon lag in XP for me is processing of Group Policy. Check to see if there are any group policy errors for that machine. Run a RSOP for one of the affected workstations from a DC with GPMC and check for errors. You could be applying an incompatible policy that is hanging, or running policy repeatedly by using loopback processing. Other than that, I would try running 'msconfig' from one of the XP boxes and check to see if there is anything running at startup that you can do without.

0

This discussion has been inactive for over a year.

You may get a better answer to your question by starting a new discussion.